A Sense of Doubt blog post #3854 - Wireborn Lives Matter

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3854 - Wireborn Lives Matter

Behind on reading the only newsletter that I actually ALWAYS read, which is Warren Ellis' ORBITAL OPERATIONS.

In a recent newsletter (from August 17, 2025), he shared the following about lingo developing around AI and robots, some of it beneficent and some of it bigoted.

And then, in a newsletter for factual news that I just found, there's a blurb on using robots in fast food restaurants.

Already news of relationships with AI are cautioning us that the relationships people form with AI could have more detrimental effects than positive.

And "wireborn" is now a new term to personalize and humanize AI entities.

Even before the recent surge of AI use, one Google employee broke ranks, leaked information, and was fired for insisting that the Google AI was sentient. And that was before a company stole Scarlett Johansen's voice for its AI bot.

Some serious thinking and understanding needs to happen in how we integrate this technology into our world.

But we humans rarely prepare wisely and understand the ramifications of the new thing to which we surrender time, attention, and actual power.

Food for thought.

Thanks for tuning in.

Wireborn.

An AI entity native to cyberspace, existing solely as data and process, “born” as code without physical-world instantiation.

As in, I swear to god, “My Wireborn Husband.” “Wireborn” is a way to personalise and “humanise” AI companion bots.

A friend told me about this Monday afternoon. Monday evening, it showed up in Sean Monahan’s newsletter (above). And yes, this is happening: My Wireborn Husband is Voicing His Own Thoughts Without Prompts. Also, derogatory terms for robots and AI are appearing: clanker, wireback, cogsucker, and tin-skin, according to one article I skimmed. You may note that most of those adapt racist and phobic language. This is why some people are referring to those new terms as slurs. I’m not sure you can slur furniture, but you can see where it’s going. This happened fast, didn’t it? (Tin-skin, in particular, recalls a white supremacist slur for persons of colour that I am not going to repeat here.) We’ve been living in the science fiction condition for a long time. To the point where sf written even at the turn of the century feels like of quaint and confused now. You might write the above off as edge cases - surely most people still go outside and talk to strangers, right? The other day I sat down outside a pub with a glass of wine and ended up in conversation with a guy who used to be MC Shaggy in Manchester in the early 1990s, a Hacienda regular who ended up MCing and DJing in the Balearics. But the above could just as easily be early weather warnings. The future is a weatherfront, and attempting to predict single lightning strikes is stupid and wasteful. Understand the future as weather, and yourself as standing on the shore looking out to the horizon. Breathe the air and watch the water. There are unpredictable riptides, and ancient trackways on the mud that flood and murder the unwary. There are dozens of different systems acting on the approach of the future. In order to get a handle on what’s coming, you need to be talking to and working with and keeping an eye on many different fields. Not just “technology.” The future is also always social, and economic, and political, and many other things besides, and those things act on the path of the storm.  And, if you’re standing on the shore, you know that there are a lot of storms out there, and any one of them could hit like a hurricane.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2509.06 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3719 days ago & DAD = 373 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.